Details: Denk, Sebok, Failure and The Meaning of Life

Gyorgy Sebok

Jeremy Denk

The Phantom has recently begun piano lessons and so he was drawn to Jeremy Denk's  New Yorker article "Every Good Boy Does Fine," in the April 8 issue. 

EGBDF is a device piano students learn to help them figure out the notes on a musical score.

Why the Phantom decided at a late stage in life to knock his head against the particular wall of piano is a mystery he is still trying to fathom. There are some things the Phantom has long known about himself, among them, he cannot dance and he has absolutely no aptitude for music, with all its mathematics and memory and pitch and rhythm and harmony and demand for precision. 

But the Phantom has reached that point of life where things can either become comfortable, where you say, okay I never had it in me to be a pro ball player, so what? I can live with that. Or you can revisit failure and ineptitude and try to enrich your life by struggle and failure.

Piano requires intense concentration and learning piano requires focus and faith. The faith is that doing all the exercises, the scales, hitting the right keys with the right fingers in time to a metronome is actually valuable and leads somewhere. But, at a later age in life you don't care if it leads anywhere. You are never going to play piano with any grace; it's just the challenge of hitting those keys. And you do get little peanuts of reward, hearing those notes sound right. 

The mysterious, bizarre thing is you can hear when notes sound wrong, even if you are as unmusical as the Phantom. So hearing the notes sound right is a little reward every time. 

And just when you are feeling a little happy about getting through the scales in one piece, you go on to your lesson about rhythm and eighth notes and you fail miserably again. And once you get things reasonably under control with your right hand, things come crashing down when you have to add in the left hand.

Music is like genetics.  There are hundreds of thousands of genes, all just combinations of basic notes (amino acids) and they spew out in overwhelming volume, but when they line up correctly, you get a whale or an osprey or a falcon or a tree frog, a functioning whole of stunning magnificence. When one of those base pairs gets inverted, you get some awful anomaly, some horrible disfigurement and even death.

Denk describes listening to Gyorgy Sebok play the Gigue from Bach's first Partita. He takes two long paragraphs to describe in broad strokes and minute detail what Sebok did, and concludes by saying hearing that brief passage determined the next five years of his life, as Denk left Oberlin to study with Sebok at Indiana University. (Who knew Indiana University was the epicenter of such a fine classical music department?)

With just a few anecdotes about Sebok, Denk provides an indelible and shimmering picture of the man. My favorite  is this:

"A new dean came to the school and asked for a mission statement from the piano department, so that our goals could be incorporated into the 'business model' of the school as a whole. Sebok smoked as various earnest options were presented. Finally, he offered: 'We want to teach excellent students, very well,' and looked wearily off into the distance."

The world of classic music, for that matter of jazz or any other form of music which is not popular and lucrative, is impractical. It is a passion, an addiction. Music is heroin for the soul, and heaven help those hooked by it, because nothing else can be as interesting, joyful, rewarding, challenging or frustrating.  

It cannot be done or even appreciated by everyone, and those who do it do not care much about whether or not it rewards them in the usual, earthly ways. 

In the Phantom's case, he is blessed with lack of talent and aptitude and so he can walk away from it. 

But he is haunted by a scene from the movie Pi, in which numbers just gush out, as the computer generates the number Pi carried out to millions of places, and you wonder why this is important to the universe. These numbers make no sense, have no meaning; they just gush forward. 

But the notes, the numbers which make music have meaning--afflicted individuals (real musicians) can hear the meaning.  

It's all very existential. 

Not a bad way to wake up atrophying neurons in a senescent brain, all in all.